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11 Reasons Infographics Are Poison And Should Never Be Used On The Internet Again

Last week, we wrote about our loathing of pie charts. That piece seems to have struck a nerve, so it's about time we addressed a second major beef with modern data visualization: infographics have become abjectly terrible.

Infographics have a long, noble history that began the moment William Playfair invented the chart and ended roughly five minutes after marketers learned how little you could get away with paying a visual designer to make an infographic for a brand.

One might think that the annual mortality from cancer may be a somewhat important statistic for many Americans. But all this chart shows is "it went up and then down" in orange and blue, which is altogether pretty useless.

Where does the axis actually start? Is the bottom zero? Has the rate halved, or does the axis start somewhat higher, meaning that there has been less progress than the chart indicates?

Here's one final example that excellently segues into our next point as well. First off, that's a clown axis. Next, note how negative the negative values don't actually make sense at all:

2. To show a ratio that could be just as easily written as a number. In fact, by doodling little men and forcing your reader to (a) count the little men or (b) ignore this dumb chart, you're actually defeating the purpose of the chart — to make information more understandable:

6. Infographics bombard you with numbers because they're not actually intended to educate you .

Think of the last full infographic you saw. You've definitely seen one recently.

Do you remember what it was about? How about who produced it?

Most importantly can you recall a single statistic you read from it?

If you answered no, don't worry, that's on purpose.

The rapid-fire chart and number onslaught isn't actually designed to educate you. They're designed to sell you whatever the producer wants to sell you. They're designed to intimate credibility through data you're not supposed to actually absorb in order to sell you a product or to make you think the firm that produced it is credible. They're advertisements.

If they were for educational purposes, why are you probably having trouble recalling a single statistic form the most recent infographic you saw?

If the intention was to teach, you wouldn't have a dozen different kinds of information — bar charts, line charts, Venn diagrams, numbers, pie charts – because everyone knows that kind of is difficult for human brains to assimilate.

The point of the infographic is to compel you to remember their point, not their data. As we'll see later, you often have excellent reasons to mistrust their data.

5. The style is already so hackneyed.

Seriously, how many times can you put a title that is in a unique font [but not Helvetica] next to an extra-large bolded number next to an illustration next to a chart before you just get bored?

When someone is making stuff up or skewing data, it makes the most logical sense for the individual to make it as difficult as possible to verify their claims.

Luckily for such individuals, infographics are a perfect medium to publish poorly-sourced or inaccurate information online.

Normally, when you have a piece of information you yourself did not discover, you appropriately source the individual or institution that did. This gives the data — and yourself — credibility. With infographics, there is zero accountability for information veracity.

At the very best, an infographic will have — printed at the bottom in a profoundly small font — several places that they claim to have sourced their data from.

These citations won't be tied to individual elements of data within the infographic — creators seem to abhor footnotes for whatever reason — but instead, a hodgepodge of pseudo-accurate sources.

By and large, there are three ways that they say this information:

Wikipedia article

Highly generic web address (e.g. www.mit.edu, www.doj.gov) or agency (e.g. NASA) where you will never find the actual data source ever. These also may link to the company the infographic is shilling for.

A very specific web location that you're expected to type out into your browser bar by hand since you can't copy and paste from a JPEG.

All of these are awful, and are designed to put the bare minimum of citation work in, add a veneer of credibility without actually volunteering the original data, and avoid getting sued.
So please stop making infographics. Or, if you want to continue making infographics, I've only really encountered two people who do them well: